Avenue Biosciences has raised $5.7 million in a seed extension round to scale a high-throughput protein engineering approach aimed at improving how therapeutic proteins get made.
The round was co-led by Balnord and Tesi, with participation from existing investors Voima Ventures, Inventure, the University of Helsinki, and Dimerent.
Avenue’s pitch centers on the “secretory pathway,” the cellular machinery that folds, modifies, and secretes proteins—an area the company argues is still under-optimized in biomanufacturing. “The secretory pathway is one of the remaining black boxes in therapeutic protein production.”
Its platform uses libraries of thousands of naturally occurring and engineered signal peptides, short sequences that influence how proteins enter and move through the secretory pathway, to measure protein biogenesis efficiency and generate large datasets that can be used to tune production for specific protein targets.
As biologics become more complex, manufacturability can be a gating factor for whether programs move forward at all. “However, this adds complexity to the protein structure, adding manufacturing cost, or in the worst case, preventing the development completely.”
Because signal peptides are removed from the mature protein, Avenue says the approach can help improve manufacturing outcomes without changing the therapeutic target, including in biosimilars production.
The company said the financing brings its total funding raised since 2024 to $8.7 million, and traced the underlying technology to research from the University of Helsinki and the Ville Paavilainen laboratory. “Many life-altering therapeutic innovations remain out of reach for most of the global population.”
